Long ago, in a IT operations model far, far away, businesses built their data centers. Rows and rows of server racks humming away in closets tangled with cables -- that was IT’s lifeblood. It was a time when virtualization meant that thing a couple of gung-ho admins toyed with on an old HP DL360 server destined for the garbage bin.

Our days as ops admins consisted of unboxing pallets of servers, heaving them into the closest server rack, and struggling to get the rails aligned just right. Then we'd pop in the manufacturer's CD, install the OS, drivers, and load it onto the network. Only then would we return to the cooler confines of our desks to remote desktop or SSH into the server to install the required software and configure the settings necessary to meet developers’ application specs.

Those days are over: No more servers treated as individuals with funny names like Uranus to care and feed like an ops family cat. Today, the cloud -- whether public, private, or hybrid -- has greatly transformed operations work, an evolution that has many dyed-in-the-wool admins wading in waters once considered entirely the realm of developers. Isn’t it high time you do the same?

Following are our essential career makeover tips for admins looking to develop their devops chops and future-proof their careers, as organizations increasingly head for the cloud.